Samsung is said to be intensively testing the Snapdragon 820

A couple of weeks ago we first heard that Samsung might use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chipset for next year's Galaxy S7, and now a new report pretty much confirms this possibility.

According to a Korean publication, Samsung is currently busy putting the Snapdragon 820through some very intensive testing. The results of all those tests will have a bearing in whether Samsung decides to use the Snapdragon 820 in the Galaxy S7 or not.

At the moment things seem to be going well, which means we may once again see a Samsung flagship with two SoC choices, each offered in certain markets only. This was the case for a few years, until this year when the Galaxy S6 only went with Samsung's own Exynos chipset. The reason for that probably has something to do both with the performance of the Exynos 7420, but also with the much-publicized overheating problems that the Snapdragon 810 encounters.

Its successor, the Snapdragon 820, is set to be quite different in that regard, though, so it may once again be seen in a high-end Samsung device.

Snapdragon 820 on August 11

Qualcomm first acknowledged the Snapdragon 820 chipset back in March at MWC, but then it only gave us a couple of vague hints about what it would entail. If a new rumor is to be believed, though, we're now very close to the unveiling of the full details regarding Qualcomm's next top of the line SoC.

This is said to be happening next week, on August 11 to be precise, at a special event in Los Angeles. So far we've been told just that the Snapdragon 820 will use Kryo cores, custom designed by Qualcomm. This will signify a return to the company's past antics, as custom designed Krait CPU cores have been featured in its top of the line offerings as recently as the Snapdragon 805.

The Snapdragon 810 is different in that it uses ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. The 810 has been plagued by overheating issues (which have obviously been shot down by Qualcomm on several occasions), so device makers everywhere are anxiously waiting for the 820. This will probably power a smartphone near you at the end of the year, or, more likely, in early 2016.

It will have a quad-core CPU, the Adreno 530 GPU, the MDM9x55 LTE Cat.10 modem, and will be made on a FinFET process - either Samsung's 14nm or TSMC's 16nm.